


Pour Out the Wine

by Idris



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Baby Witchers, Gen, Grief/Mourning, School of the Griffin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:14:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27781345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Idris/pseuds/Idris
Summary: Coën, trying to find the other side of grief after the loss of his School, comes across something unexpected.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	Pour Out the Wine

Coën does not think that he will ever be free of the shame that fills him whenever he remembers that he is the last Griffin, because how could destiny choose him?

Shame, and anger, and a grief so consuming that sometimes in the long nights he has to press his face into his knees and scream into his hands. And his nights are so, so long.

Why him. Why not Marina, brave laughing Marina who cut off her golden hair and fought with a shining spear and wrote love poems to the moon? Why not Tomek, who had mastered alchemy and knew the steps to every court dance and could name, oh, any star in the sky? Why not Peszko, who was the best Witcher their school had ever had, and so, so kind?

So now Coën has to somehow be just as brave, and poetic, and curious, and clever, and kind, because who else is left to be all of these things- but how does he do it without them? How does he do it, when they were all so _much_ more than him? He’s just the kid who hadn’t finished growing into his armour when they-

He was going to learn so much from them. Study so many things. Hear so many tales. Sit down at their table and pour the wine and tell his own stories, once he had them. Now he has the stories, and not one of them is left to hear them.

What’s the point in the telling, now? They are all empty. The cast is gone. There are no players to the script, and no audience. He’s just the understudy, standing on a blank stage, waiting for lights that he knows will never shine.

Coën has learned to bottle up his grief. Trap it in glass, and look at it from the outside, like fireflies in jars. Pretend that it was something outside his body, outside his head, that it belonged to someone else’s heart, put it somewhere very distant. Some days he doesn’t feel much of anything at all, wonders if he’s forgotten how.

Then he finds himself standing outside on a spring night, the stars cold and clear and hard in the sky, broken glass under his feet, and three children looking up at him like he was the answer to something they hadn’t asked. Three new Griffin Witchers.

The youngest boy’s name is Peszko.

**Author's Note:**

> My first posted fan fiction in 4 years, and my very first foray into the wonderful world of The Witcher- please be merciful :D 
> 
> This is part of a longer piece I have in mind, with Lambert and Coën stumbling across a group of children who have been experimented on by mages trying to recreate Witcher mutagens. Hopefully there will be more to follow, though it may be more of a series of ficlets rather than a full story.
> 
> Now crossposted to my Tumblr under ultravioletgyarados (https://ultravioletgyarados.tumblr.com/post/636333616746659840/pour-out-the-wine)


End file.
